PAMS – A New Collaborative Framework for Agent-Based Simulation of Complex Systems

Abstract

Abstract.Major researches in the domain of complex systems are interdisciplinary, collaborative and geographically distributed. The purpose of our work is to explore a new collaborative approach that facilitates scientist's interactions during the modelling and simulating process. The originality of the presented approach is to consider models and simulators as a board of the collaboration: a shared object manipulated by a group of scientists. Agent-based simulations are powerful tools for studying complex systems. In this context, we develop a collaborative platform dedicated to agent-based simulation (PAMS). This new environment integrates common collaborative tools (e.g. videoconferencing, instant messaging, whiteboard) and specific tools to share and manipulate models, simulators, experiments and results... The current version of PAMS is based technologies coming from distributed systems. Today PAMS has been designed to support major agent based simulation frameworks. This paper aims to give an overview of the PAMS environment by defining the collaborating approach, the framework architecture and an example of its utilization.